He was damn good at what he did. The best. He supposed that was why the queen and the authoritarians put up with him. However, not knowing where he was wasn’t smart behavior. It was not the behavior a hunter should be engaging in.

He looked around again, trying to remember the night before. There had been a woman. Hell, there was always a woman. Pretty much every night when he wasn’t hunting. He wasn’t a snob. He loved women—all kinds of women. Most of his fellow vampires looked on human women like humans would look on cattle. They were meant to be food sources. And one did not fuck one’s food. Then there were those who loved humans like a master loves his beloved pet—but still one did not fuck a beloved pet.

Halo was much more earthy than that. Women were women—food or otherwise. They had all the necessary parts that made them women. Vampire snobbery was just that…snobbery. Vampires who looked down on him for his habit of fornicating with human women could bite his rock hard ass. Or they could try. The bonus about being the best in the hunting biz was that no one dared say anything to his face about his choice in sleeping partners. Hell, they didn’t even dare say it behind his back for fear it would get back to him. Oh, there were those who weren’t afraid of him, those who dared, but he couldn’t care less about them if he tried. And he was always up for popping someone in the face for being a gutsy wiseass.

Halo sat up and the room spun. That was definitely not a good thing. He looked around again and noticed the room was a bit Spartan for a woman’s bedroom. There was the queen sized bed he was lying on, a pair of recliners in front of a wall-mounted television, and a small round table with two chairs pulled up to it. He would have thought he was in a studio apartment, but there was no kitchen. There was a single door leading out of the room, which meant there were no closets. That must utterly suck, he thought. He may be a low-class hunter, but he had ultra cool digs and the money to furnish it with everything he wanted…like an enormous flat-screen TV that put the one on the wall to shame.

Actually he had four TVs. But who’s counting?

He threw back the cover hat had been tossed haphazardly over his hips and realized he was naked. He looked around the room, but there were no clothes to be found.

Now he was just irritated. He got to his feet and again the room spun, only this time it seriously rocked him and he sat back down again as nausea rushed over him. He swallowed hard against it then got back up. He gritted his teeth against any further lurching of his stomach and staggered to the door leading out of the room. He yanked it open and found it led to a bathroom.

Blinking in confusion he rechecked the walls of the box room for another door. There wasn’t one visible. There was one window covered by heavy floor-to-ceiling drapes and another long high one that ran the length of the room on the east side allowing that damnable sunlight into the room. It was barely six inches in height…if that. So he walked over to the floor-to-ceiling drapes, thinking maybe there was an exit behind them. A porch slider or something. But when he pulled the curtains apart they revealed what had once been a window but was now completely bricked in.

“What the fuck?”

Halo felt a sense of dread invade him as he stared at the freshly blocked-off portal. He placed a hand against it and pushed, checking to see if there was any give, any way to get out. It didn’t budge and his feeling of dread intensified. As did his anger. He was pissed. Mad pissed. If what was happening was what he thought was happening, someone was going to die. Painfully. Slowly.

Twice.

He left the window and began to pace the outer perimeter of the room. It didn’t take him long to find the seam of what appeared to be a door over on the south side of the room near where the table and chairs were set up. It also didn’t take him long to realize there were cameras in all of the upper corners of the room, protected by clear, thick plastic bolted into the walls.

He ignored the cameras for the moment and examined the seam to the hidden door. He pushed at the drywall covering it and knocked on it. It was solid. No sound of an echo or a hint that there might be hollow space behind. He continued all along the walls searching for any hollow sound only to be frustrated by the lack of it.

He still didn’t consider himself in trouble, however. It would take much more than a sealed room to make him panic. Okay, so a sealed room and being naked and watched was pushing his comfort level, but he wasn’t known for being easily ruffled. What he needed to find out was who had put him there, how he had even gotten there, and what the person’s endgame was.

“All right,” he said aloud to the cameras. “You have my attention. What the fuck do you want?”

He waited, glaring up directly into one of the cameras.

And waited.

And waited.

After about ten minutes without a response he began to get antsy. He looked around the room and took in his surroundings again. What caught on his attention was that there were two recliners and two chairs at the dining table. That meant someone was eventually going to join him…whether it be his captor or someone else. He discarded the information as unimportant for the moment. He walked over to the little table between the two recliners and picked up the remote that was sitting on it. He clicked on the TV and it blinked on. To a screen split into quarters. Four different angles into a room as exactly square as his was. In fact, the room was so identical it could have been his…except in this room was a woman.

She was sitting in one of the recliners in her room, naked, with her legs drawn up tightly to her chest. The picture was in black and white, so all he could tell was that she had dark hair and was white skinned…or so it seemed. It wasn’t as though he could see gradations of skin tone. But she definitely wasn’t black.

“Please…”

That was when he realized he could hear in the room as well as see.

“Please tell me what you want!” she yelled.

She was crying. He heard her breath hitch and saw her wipe away tears. Damn it she looked scared to death. Who was she? He could imagine all kinds of reasons as to why he had been taken captive, but he couldn’t imagine why she would have been. He knew nothing about her. He had never seen her before in his life. The picture was not exactly big or clear so he couldn’t be one hundred percent certain, but he was almost positive she was a stranger. She wasn’t his type—she was far too pretty to be his type. He liked them mediocre and desperate. Made things easier. Pretty women expected too much.